"AlisdairM" <alisdair.meredith@uk.renaultf1.com> wrote in message news:d7itb3$6mk$1@sea.gmane.org...
Aggregate initialization is an important part of the array concept, allowing it to act largely as a plug-in replacement for language arrays, with the bonus it can be passed by value as well as by reference. The main drawback here is that we cannot deduce the size of a boost::array, as you can with a language array.
I know this is looking ahead quite a bit, but the next version of C++ is going to have a new meaning for the "auto" keyword. The code auto x = foo(); will declare x as a variable whose type is deduced from the return type of foo() (See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2005/n1794.pdf for details). It should be possible to use this to create a function that creates an array of the correct size: template <class T> array<T, 1> make_array(const T &t1); template <class T> array<T, 2> make_array(const T &t1, const T &t2); template <class T> array<T, 3> make_array(const T &t1, const T &t2, const T &t3); etc. Then we would be able to write code like auto my_array = make_array(1,2, 3); // The type of my_array is array<int, 3> Joe Gottman